From the book Transcultural Experiments: Russian and American
Models of Creative Communication. New York: St. Martin's Press (Scholarly
and Reference Division), 1999, pp. 201-213 (Chapter 17)

The goal of collective improvisation is to encourage interactions among
different disciplinary perspectives, life experiences, and worldviews.
It can also be identified with the task Richard Rorty has set for thinkers
of the future: "They would be all-purpose intellectuals who were ready
to offer a view on pretty much anything, in the hope of making it hang
together with everything else."1 Improvisations might be thought
of as metaphysical "assaults" on ordinary things, experiments in creative
communication, or exercises in the creation of Rorty's "all-purpose intellectuals."

1. Creativity and Communication

The word "improvisation" derives from the Latin "providere" and literally
means "unforeseeable." Improvisation opens the unpredictability of creation
for the creator himself. Any kind of creativity, however, shares this feature;
otherwise, our mental activity would be better characterized as "knowledge,"
"scholarship," "erudition," "exercise," "training." What is it that makes
improvisation different from creativity as such, which to a certain degree
is also improvisational?

Typically in creativity the unforeseeable is contained in the mind of
the creator himself. Isolation and self-concentration is a precondition
for creative self-expression: A person meditates and converses with himself,
therefore, conversations with others become irritating and counterproductive
for him.

Quite different is the case in which the unforeseeable is contained
in the consciousness of another person, beyond the competence and horizon
of the improviser. The topic of improvisation is given to me by somebody
else, or it can be also an exchange of topics. Improvisation is a type
of creativity that evolves between the poles of the known and unknown,
which are contained in different consciousnesses. This is why improvisation,
as distinct from self-centered creativity, necessarily includes the process
of communication: Somebody suggests a topic, unexpected for the improviser,
whose task is to elaborate this topic unpredictably for the one who suggested
it. Thus, two unpredictabilities arise from the improvisation as the encounter
of two consciousnesses. The specificity of improvisation originates in
the fact that it is creativity via communication.

But if improvisation is impossible without communication, how does it
differ from communication as such? Regular modes of communication presuppose
that one interlocutor communicates to another what is already known to
him. Even news communicated in such typical situations is news only for
the listener but not for the speaker. Typically, communication only reproduces
those facts and ideas that existed before and independently of the process
of communication. Communication aims to diminish the unknown and to transform
it into something known, extending it in a horizontal dimension from one
person to another. The psychological value of communication arises from
the fact that its participants are united in their thoughts and feelings,
and the contents of one consciousness are transferred to another.

Although improvisation is impossible without communication, it pursues
quite different goals. What is communicated in response to the proposed
topic is unknown to the improviser himself. Here the unknown generates
something still more unknown. Having received an unpredictable topic, the
improviser further elaborates it in an unpredictable way.

Thus, improvisation is distinct from creativity in that it incorporates
communication with a different consciousness, and it is distinct from communication
in that it includes an act of creativity, the production of something unknown
and unforeseeable. Typically, communication with another person distracts
from the act of creativity, and vice versa, the act of creativity inhibits
or impedes the process of communication. In improvisation, however, creativity
and communication reinforce rather than neutralize each other. Improvisation
unites creativity and communication as two vectors transcending one's own
consciousness. In creativity, this transcendence acquires a vertical dimension,
since it is addressed to a higher plane of oneself, whereas communication
operates through horizontal transcendence, relating one individual to another.

Consequently, improvisation combines the horizontal and vertical modes
of transcendence. Through improvisation, the otherness of another person
gives an impetus to my creative self-transcendence. It is as if I take
the others' positions of expectation and surprise toward myself, and this
"unknown in the other" who I am for the others, generates in myself the
effort to create this "otherness" that is the aim of improvisation. An
encounter with the consciousness of another and the discovery of otherness
in one's own consciousness are the two mutually stimulating processes in
improvisation.

2. The Existential Event of Thinking

The improviser creates something different than what he ever could invent
and imagine alone, because he is confronted with an unfamiliar topic that
requires immediate elaboration, which mobilizes all of his intellectual
potential. This resembles a situation of mortal danger in which a human
may develop instantly supernatural capacities that leave him as soon as
the danger recedes. The mind attacked by a problem feverishly looks for
an escape, for a creative solution, and is quickly mobilized in response
to the threat of intellectual failure, blankness, and stupidity. There
is no other situation that is intellectually as challenging and stimulating
as improvisation. Writing an essay for an exam or participating in a brainstorming
session always involves some elements of preparation and preliminary specification
among expected tasks and topics (the subject of the university course,
the agenda of professional discussion). Only at an improvisational session
is the range of possible topics absolutely open, extending to all existing
disciplines, discourses, and vocabularies.

Improvising presupposes the ability to apply one's intellectual capacities
to any realm of human experience. Everybody knows about frogs, but does
anybody give attention and effort to thinking about them, except for zoologists,
specializing in amphibians? This is the point: We think that we know, but
how can we know if we do not think? The majority of people never exercise
their thinking abilities beyond the very narrow field of their specialty
(if it requires thinking at all). We may have had a passive, sensual experience
of seeing, hearing, or touching frogs, but we do not have the active, intellectual
experience of thinking about them, and therefore, we are not really self-conscious
humans in this aspect of our existence: in relation to frogs­or in
relation to trees and bees, for that matter. In relation to almost everything
in the world.

To think means to conceptualize a certain entity, to define its general
and distinctive properties, its place in the world, and its place in our
life. What are frogs? Why do they exist? How are they different from toads,
lizards, and snakes? How do they feed the human imagination and mythology?
Why did they inspire storytellers and Aristophanes? How have they been
viewed in the past and in the present? What is their symbolic role in my
native and foreign cultures? What is my personal attitude toward these
creatures and how do they fit into my picture of the world, relate to my
psychology and metaphysics, my fears and fantasies? We are not fully
human if something present in our sensual experience is absent from our
intellectual experience. We have to think what we feel and feel what we
think, not because these capacities coincide but precisely because they
are so different and one cannot substitute for another.

Thinking is usually regarded as a means to some palpable practical goal:
Technological thinking serves to create machines and tools; political thinking,
to create effective social institutions, etc. But thinking is a capacity
that does not need any external justification because, more than anything
else, it makes humans human. The question "Why think?" is ultimately as
unanswerable as the questions "Why feel?" "Why breathe?" or "Why live?"
The ultimate reward for thinking is thinking itself.

Collective improvisation is one way to immensely expand the realm of
the thinkable and to re-live our experience in a conscious, discerning,
articulate manner. All things that appear to be familiar, as components
of routine knowledge, suddenly become estranged and deautomatized, become
targets of inquiry and interrogation, potential objects of intellectual
labor.

Improvisation permits not only an estrangement of objects, but also
an estrangement of subjects. People whom we may have known for years now
for the first time appear in the existential, "liminal" situation of creativity.
We do not know who they really are, as at this moment they are equally
unfamiliar to themselves. Creativity is the most mysterious and intimate
moment in the life of personality, and this makes improvisation a truly
existential experiment and revelation about oneself and others. Usually
creativity is presented to others in premeditated and generically predetermined
forms, as paintings, poems, dances­as results from which the creator
has already distanced herself even if she is singing or acting on the scene.
In improvisation, the mystery of creativity is revealed most intimately
and spontaneously, as the self-creation of a personality here and now.

An improviser encounters an otherness and strangeness in the object
of his thought, in the cosubjects of his thinking, and finally, in himself.
Therefore, improvisation is not only a social but also an existential event,
or, more precisely, the rarest case of existential sociality, in
which sociality and existentiality do not exclude but presuppose each other.
Do we ever think together­not just talk about what we already know,
not just socialize, but create a social event of cothinking where each
participant is as unknown to others as he is unpredictable to himself?

3. Improvisational Communities: Distinctions between Professional
And Folkloric Improvisations

Collective improvisation differs essentially from a traditional public
or professional improvisation, which typically takes place in poetic readings
or musical concerts and competitions. A professional improviser performs
before the audience, which has a purely passive role, and he is opposed
to it as an active creator. The audience can participate only in the first
moment by setting a topic for improvisation. The act of communication here
is incomplete because one of the participants acquires a privileged role
and is divided from the audience by the stage. In a collective improvisation,
by contrast, each participant enters a reciprocal relationship of questioning
and answering with all the others.

The next question is, how does this collective and spontaneous creativity
differ from folklore with its oral tradition? In folklore, the performer,
as a bearer of mass consciousness, is not separated from his audience;
he is one among many singers or storytellers. Improvisation indeed plays
an important role in folklore because creativity and communication here
have not yet been separated. There is no division between the creation
of art and communication through art, between composing and performing:
both are enacted in one setting, in one moment of time. This includes what
can be called intellectual or philosophical improvisation, such as the
dialogues of Socrates: creativity in the process of communication.

The comparison with folklore makes clear that the concert-type of improvisation
is the result of a disintegration of the initial syncretic creative community.
Improvisational community has degenerated into a unidirectional communication
from the creator to a passive audience. The professional improvisation,
in which the performer is distanced from his silent audience, is a curious
hybrid of ancient folkloric and modern individual creativity. What remains
from folklore is the immediate process of creativity amidst people; what
persists from individual creativity is separateness from the audience.
In Plato's dialogues, it is not only Socrates who improvises but also his
interlocutors. This is the prototype of improvisational community that
avoids the division into performer and passive audience.

It is important to understand that although the improvisational group
resembles a commune, its communality extends only to ideas, not to bodies
and property. It is in the sphere of thinking that collectivity is not
destructive for individuals. Bodies and things are separated by their own
spatial nature; a violation of their boundaries can lead to aggression
and violence, as in the communist utopia of the twentieth century. The
attempt to extend community to material, sexual, economic aspects of life
may lead to those repressive excesses of unification that have engendered
some of the most bloody conflicts, wars, and revolutions of modernity.
Improvisational community does not confuse these two spheres as was done,
for example, in hippie communes where the communality of ideas was extrapolated
to include property and sexual relationships. A human being must remain
a full master of her body and material possessions, but ideas do not belong
to her exclusively since by their very nature they are fluid and nomadic,
freely traveling from mind to mind. Collective improvisation aspires to
that kind of communality which never oversteps the boundary of what has
a potential and propensity for commonness.

Such restrictions on commonality have not only an ethical, but also
a historical rationale. In folklore, the same oral tradition is shared
by all performers, and a single work of verbal art, impersonal and anonymous,
belongs to everybody and to nobody. Such folkloric rites cannot be reproduced
now in their original form: Collective improvisations, if they wish to
be contemporary, must incorporate­not eliminate­the individual
mode of creativity. The aesthetics of communality constitutive of folklore
cannot fully prevail over the aesthetics of difference that is constitutive
of modern creativity. But these two aesthetics have a potential to interact
in such a way that communality accentuates rather than destroys individual
differences. The commonness of the topic, the unity of time and place,
the equality in the conditions of improvisation serve to emphasize, not
to efface individual differences.

At some sessions, different roles are distributed among the participants
in advance; for example, one might accentuate heroic aspects of the topic,
another, tragic motifs; the third will modify it in a baroque style, the
fourth in a romantic key, and so forth. The result of collective improvisation
is a "postindividual" community of minds that presupposes highly individual
contributions of all participants. Unlike folklore, collective improvisation
is not a pre-individual form of creativity; nor is it a solely individual
creativity, as in a concert-type performance. Instead, it is transindividual
creativity that embraces the diversity of interpretations manifested in
individual texts.

4. Why Writing?

Why is it necessary for improvisation to have a written character? In
front of a sheet of paper or a computer screen, a person experiences the
full measure of her individual responsibility as a creator. Without writing,
improvisation tends to dissolve into conversation, exchange of opinions;
that is, pure communication. To be truly creative, communication must incorporate
moments of privacy, isolation, and meditation.

The dialectics of these two factors, isolation and communication, is
rather complex. Improvisations are conducted in several stages, in which
the periods of speech and silence alternate: discussing and choosing the
topic, then writing, then reading and discussing again, then (sometimes)
jointly writing summaries of the discussions. Thus, creative minds are
joined, disjoined, and rejoined in the process of improvisation, which
displays the dialectics of individual and collective.

To a certain degree, collective improvisation, as a genre born in Russia,
combines the experiences of public eloquence characteristic of the West
and silent meditation characteristic of the East. It is writing that solves
the dilemma of speech and silence. The silence of writing allows all participants
to coexist in one mood, one mode of intellectual activity, while pursuing
different interpretations of the same topic. In the community of writing,
there is no division into subjects and objects, which is practically inevitable
in oral communication. We know how one person's insatiable "will to speak"
can easily transform an entire community into a submissive audience. Collective
writing is a silent communication in which the unidimensional time of speaking
(one speaker at a time) submits to the multidimensional space of co-thinking.
No one's thought is imposed on another's until these parallel flows of
thinking are fully mature, ready to be individually expressed.

Between the rhetorical orientation of Greek antiquity and the Far Eastern
culture of silent meditation is located the Near Eastern love of books,
literacy, and writing, simultaneously silent and self-expressive. The figure
of a scribe and copyist is cherished and even sanctified in "bookish" Judaic,
Babylonian, Egyptian, Islamic, Byzantine cultures, as distinct from the
Western exaltation of a public orator and the Eastern cult of a silent
sage, "Zen master," "yogi."2 In Russia, with its geographical
location between Europe and Asia, and with its cultural habits inherited
from Byzantium, writing is also traditionally considered the supreme kind
of intellectual activity, which may partly explain the preference for writing
as it developed in Russian improvisational communities.

Writing is a much more intellectually obligating and binding activity
than speaking because its result is immediately fixed. Unlike an oral utterance,
the written word becomes "immortal" at the very moment of its birth. Thus
the Russian proverb: "What is written by a pen, cannot be cut out by an
ax." To write creatively (not pragmatically) in the presence of other people
is a rather unusual and apparently uncomfortable occupation, especially
as there is no chance to revise or polish the text (except for several
minutes of purely technical editing at the end of the session). The presence
of other people intensifies the course of thinking; since each word written
is the last one, the process itself becomes its own result. The responsibility
grows as writing must be completed in the given place and span of time.

An improviser is an intellectual soldier who has to fulfill his duty
wherever he finds himself. He does not have the privilege of a general
in choosing the place of the battle, the topic for meditation. He must
be prepared to engage with any topic, to start an intellectual battle over
any circumstance or facet of human experience.

As the acquisition of this nomadic way of thinking, the variety of ideas
are spontaneously generated in improvisation that would never occur if
participants had been working in the seclusion of their offices and had
the support of many books, dictionaries, preliminary notes and plans. Many
participants later confessed that improvisation allowed them to break through
the stupors and impasses of their thinking and provided germs for subsequent,
more substantial scholarly or literary works.Of course, improvisation
is not a substitute for the professional work of a writer, scientist, scholar,
etc. On the other hand, no other intellectual activity, however fruitful
it might be, can substitute for improvisation. Improvisation relates to
other avenues of creative thinking as the whole is related to its parts.
It integrates not only creativity and communication but also theoretical
and artistic genres of creativity, private and public forms of communication.

5. The Integrative Mode of Intellectual Activity: Essay and Trance

Improvisation is an integrative mode of intellectual activity in the
same way as that essay is an integrative genre of writing. The products
of improvisation usually belong not to purely scholarly or purely artistic
genres but to experimentally synthetic, essayistic genres. As I have already
indicated, an essay is partly a diary, journal, intimate document; partly
a theoretical discourse, treatise, article; partly a short story, anecdote,
parable, small fictional narrative. The immediate result of improvisation
is a highly associative but structured and conceptualized meditation on
a specific topic that unites facticity, generalization, and imagination.
An improvisation and an essay are related as the process and result, act
and product, but both are integrative in their generic model. The integration
of factuality, conceptualization, and imagery in the essay corresponds
to the integration of cognition, communication, and creativity in improvisation.

As was mentioned in the chapter on the essay, the integrity of this
genre is of a post-reflexive quality: The three constituents must be consciously
articulated, in distinction from a pre-reflective mythology, in which image,
concept, and fact are presented as a syncretic unity. In the same way,
improvisation differentiates its constituents: creativity, communication,
and cognition in contrast with syncretic practices of religious meditation
and contemplation, such as Zen meditation. In collective improvisation,
the topic is articulated differently from its interpretations; individual
approaches are stated clearly, and participants are working separately
on their contributions.

Improvisation does share some similarity with various contemplative
states, but here the object of intellectual contemplation does not dissolve
into an all-embracing absolute. Rather, it is conceived in its absolute
uniqueness, through a series of definitions and specifications. The psychological
state of an improviser is not completely self-centered and self-enclosed
but produces a tangible entity, a system of signs, a text as a part of
the external world that is subject to rational evaluation and discussion.
Improvisation intensifies the experience of vertical and horizontal
transcendence inherent in creativity and communication, but nevertheless
it is not identical to a trance state. Improvisation has nothing
to do with sacramental ecstasy, mystical agitation, or quiet resignation,
which resist any objectification and analytic judgment. Improvisation is
a self-reflective trance that transcends the boundaries of trance itself,
making it an object of rational negotiation and communication.

Improvisation relates to trance in the same way as the essay relates
to myth. The essay is the truth of an approximation to myth, not a lie
of total coincidence with it. Improvisation is an experience of approximation
to trance, not the exaltation of collective ecstasy, or quasi-folkloric
community, or a hypnotic and dreamlike state of mind.

6. Un-ity: Claims and Disclaimers

The practice of improvisation raises the socio-epistemological question
of how one cohesive whole can be created spontaneously from the multiplicity
of individual voices without resorting to the external will of one all-encompassing
authority. This inductive "unity from diversity" contrasts with the more
typical deductive model in which the author divides himself into separate
characters and ideological positions. Both Plato in his philosophical dialogues
and Dostoevsky in his polyphonic novels were unitary authors who produced
the diversity of voices from the unity of one creative consciousness. The
question is, Can voices be united from within, without the anticipating
and dictating will of the "transcendental" author?

Only at the peak of the liberal development of individualism and at
the threshold of a post-individualist culture can we consciously and cautiously
approach this problem. When personality has come to full self-realization,
it has no other ways to develop further than to give itself to others.
This sacrificial task formulated by Fyodor Dostoevsky as an ethical imperative
becomes a methodological principle of improvisation. The goal is to reintegrate
oneself in an intellectual community not in its syncretic elementary form
that preceded the birth of individuality, but in a fully articulated, synthetic
form that issues from the self-transcendence of a conscious individuality.

Thus "unity" as the basis of collective improvisation should be understood
both deconstructively and constructively. In the very word "unity" we can
detect not only its conventional meaning ("oneness, totality") but also
the hidden disclaimer "un" which as a root means "one," and as a prefix,
the negation or the reversal of the implied action ("undo," "unknown").
Let the word "un-ity" haunt us with this prefix-disclaimer (pronounced
"an-ity") that problematizes the very meaning of unity. Collective improvisation
is a small laboratory of such problematic integration that is both the
disintegration of primitive, folkloric unities and a prototype of some
fluid communities of the future.

Certainly one should not expect from improvisations those literary masterpieces
that are created only by the continuous and sustained efforts of an individual
mind. As a rule, improvisations are inferior in their literary or scholarly
quality to the output within established genres or disciplines. In the
same way, there are no essays comparable in their value and grandeur to
the tragedies of Shakespeare, the epics of Homer, or the novels of Dostoevsky.
But this is not because the essay is an inferior genre; on the contrary,
it integrates the possibilities of other genres: philosophical, historical,
fictional. The very range of these possibilities complicates the task of
their complete realization because the discrepancy between actual performance
and potential perfection is deeper in the essay than in more specific and
structured genres. There are perfect fables and sonnets, maybe short stories,
but even the best novels impress us mostly with their "colossal failures"
(according to William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe was the best novelist of his
generation precisely because his failure was greater than that of other
authors). To achieve prominence in the essay genre is even more difficult
because it is generically so fluid and indeterminate and lacks the strict
rules provided by the narrative structure of the novel or by the logical
structure of philosophical discourse.

In the same way improvisation does not achieve the depth and breadth
of individual creativity, the sincerity of personal communication, or the
rigor of scientific research. Both essays and improvisations are forms
of cultural potentiality that in every specific case, with each particular
effort, remains unfulfilled. Improvisation fails to compare with literature,
art, science, scholarship . . . But improvisation combines all these elements
that, in their ideal combination, produce a work in the genre of culture
itself. There are no words in existing vocabularies to designate a creator
of culture. There are artists, writers, scientists, scholars, engineers
. . . but at this point culture has not become the site or genre of creativity
(we do not count political and financial management of culture, or educational
popularization of culture, which themselves are not culturally creative).
Such creativity in the genre of culture is the ultimate possibility of
transcultural thinking, which finds in collective improvisation its very
tentative experimental model. The deficiencies of improvisational works
reflect the unrealized potentials of culture as a whole. The forms of the
novel or tragedy, of treatise or monograph are more narrow and definitive
than this polyphonic and polysophic orchestra that resonates in the ensembles
of co-thinking individuals.

Collective improvisation is a microcosm of cultural activities where
speech and silence, writing and reading are articulated in their difference
and simultaneously compressed into one time and one place. That is why
the process of improvisation is so intellectually and emotionally intense:
The poles of creation and perception, writing and reading, reading and
discussing, which in the symbolic system of culture are usually divided,
delayed, complexly mediated, separated by years or centuries, are condensed
into the several hours of an improvisational session, here and now.

One cannot adequately understand improvisation without being an active
participant in it. Reading the texts produced by an improvisational session
does not provide a quite adequate impression. The main product of improvisation
is the expansion of consciousness that may find its expression in texts
written individually months or years after the session. The text, as a
fixed result of an improvisational session, is only a way to the goal,
which is collective thinking itself, an experience of intellectual brotherhood.

The texts of a given session cannot be regarded as self-sufficient products
also because the integral work should be considered the totality of texts
produced in the course of the existence of a given improvisational community.
One page or one chapter of a novel does not constitute a separate work
simply because it was created in one sitting and separated from another
by temporal intervals. The improvisational community has its history, which
is reflected in the sequence of improvisations that should be read like
chapters of one novel. Only with the disintegration of the given community
can its work be considered complete.

But the improvisational community can find another fate: Gradually expanding
from generation to generation, it may incessantly integrate new individuals,
communities, and societies. The collective improvisation can become one
of the most creative forms of interaction among the intellectuals of the
future. The growth of the Internet makes a collective improvisation that
will involve thousands of the most active minds of humanity quite feasible.3

Notes

1. Richard Rorty, "Pragmatism and Philosophy," in After Philosophy:
End or Transformation? ed. Kenneth Baynes, James Bohman, and Thomas
McCarthy (Cambridge, MA, and London: The MIT Press, 1991): 56.
2. In his influential book Poetika rannevizantiiskoi literatury
(Moscow: Nauka, Glavnaia redaktsiia vostochnoi literatury, 1977), Sergei
Averintsev articulates this cultural difference. As opposed to the Western
intellectual, who has the luxury of freedom of expression traceable to
liberal ancient Greek oratorial modes, a Russian intellectual finds himself
in the position of the bent and harried scribe of the ancient Near East,
who had to survive political oppression by delivering his innermost thoughts,
not in open speech to his contemporaries, but in writing to an audience
in posterity. This accounts for the gravitation of Russian culture, among
others in Eastern Christianity, to the "mute word," while Western culture
favors oral and visual modes.
3. This is the task and the hope of my next project, the InteLnet (Chapter
22).